Quality of Hire sounds great, right? But where does the rubber meet the road? What specifically can organizations learn about themselves by measuring it? We’re glad you asked! Here are two concrete examples of invaluable insights Searchlight customers learned from measuring QoH.

One customer found that new hires with certain soft skills were associated with higher QoH (Dependability, Being Personable, Enthusiasm, Strategic Thinking, and Independence). They also found that their company culture was significantly less innovative than Searchlight’s benchmark for tech companies, but that more innovative hires tended to have a higher QoH. By contrast, new hires that were more detail-oriented tended to be associated with a lower QoH.

This data builds a picture of what types of employees tend to excel at their organization, and gives them valuable information about their company culture. Many organizations don’t measure predictive attributes and their culture in a data-backed way. Once our customer had this information, they started managing their culture proactively and adjusting their hiring processes to interview for a quantified, specific set of traits.

Measuring QoH can also reveal patterns and problems with specific teams or groups. For example, a global organization with 1000 employees learned that QoH was lower on the engineering team and lower among non-US hires. This gave them the chance to reflect on why the talent and onboarding programs for these groups might be less effective, and work to fix the problem if desired. There were also differences in QoH across geographies and certain start months. Without measuring QoH, these potential problems wouldn’t have been uncovered.